Potential

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

October 13, 2019

23 Proper C

          Helen Myers was a 90 plus year old parishioner in my former parish when she called about 12 years ago and asked me to come visit her.  I was a little surprised, since I had just visited Helen the week before.  But she was an absolute delight and time spent with her was always a treat.  We set a date for the following week.

          After exchanging pleasantries, Helen got right to business.  She had an investment account with $103,000 in it.  That money was not doing anyone any good sitting in that account and she wondered what the church might do that sum.  On the one hand, the church had a wonderful, historic organ with two divisions still in need of restoration.  Helen had contributed generously to the restoration of the first three divisions of the organ, so perhaps she would be interested in that project.  On the other hand, the roof on the church was at least 10 years past its prime and the vestry hoped to replace the asphalt shingles with a slate roof to restore the historic integrity of the 1870’s building.  Helen thought about these options for about a nano-second before reminding me that her husband had been an engineer and that he would want to take care of the roof.  What was the point of having a fine organ if the roof could not keep the water off the instrument?

          And so, we had the advance gift for a capital campaign that put a beautiful slate roof on our historic building.  But there is more to this story than simply abundant generosity.

Helen was born in 1916 and attended a small Presbyterian church. She grew up poor, even before the Great Depression when everyone in Springfield, Ohio was poor.   She married her high school sweetheart, Charles, who grew up in the Episcopal Church in Springfield and sang in the choir as a young boy. After they married, Helen and Charles moved to Pennsylvania and Connecticut and other places before returning to retire in Springfield.  Charles died suddenly shortly after retiring and at some point thereafter Helen joined the church where her husband had been raised, going to the Wednesday morning Eucharist until she could no longer drive, sending out reminder cards for various ministries for many years, and consuming every issue of the newsletter as soon as the newsletter came out.  However, she was only rarely able to set foot in the church building and knew very few of the people in the parish other than what she read about them in the newsletter.

So, you might wonder what inspired such generous love for a church that Helen really never attended.   

When Charles, Helen’s husband, was a young boy growing up as an Episcopalian in Springfield, his father died.  His mother worked hard to raise Charles, but times were difficult financially and life was a struggle for them.  The people of that church stepped in and made sure Charles stayed in school and the family had what they needed.  Those folks mentored Charles, encouraged him, and saw that he finished high school.  When Charles graduated, the general expectation of family and friends was that Charles would get a job and support his mother.  But the people of the church stepped in again and prevailed.  They saw potential in Charles and made sure he had the resources to go college and reach his goal to become an engineer.  When he graduated from Ohio State with his degree in engineering and had a job, he and Helen married after having dated for about 8 years, and they began their moves around the country.  Charles’ career as an engineer was long and quite lucrative.

To her dying breath, Helen was extraordinarily grateful for what the church had done for her husband, and thus her family, some 90 years prior.  Helen considered her generosity to be simply an expression of her gratitude to a church that transformed the life and the potential of one child and that child’s future family.  Her deep love for the church was born of that gratitude.  Her generosity was gratitude in action.

This morning, we hear the story of Jesus and the 10 lepers.  Nine of the lepers are, in my opinion, unfairly criticized for failing to return and thank Jesus.  They were only doing exactly what Jesus told them to do.  “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”  While the 10th leper’s act of gratitude may be a little demonstrative for us reserved Episcopalians, obviously the point is that the healed man understood the magnitude of what had been done for him and was filled with such gratitude that he could do nothing but return to give thanks.  The parallel between the story of the healed man and Helen’s story is clear.  Helen also understood the magnitude of the difference God, through the church, had made in her husband’s life and in her own, and she acted on that gratitude.

Gratitude and generosity are both commendable and well worth imitating.  But I think there is a challenge in Helen’s story that runs even deeper than the challenge to think about how our own lives reflect our gratitude for all God has done for us.

Helen’s gratitude in the last decades of her life was for what a church had done for her husband when he was a child in the 1920’s. What are we doing as a parish, both as individuals within a parish and as a parish as a whole, that 90 years from now will cause someone to look back with the kind of gratitude Helen had for her church?  How are we working to be a community of faith that will inspire that kind of gratitude?  My hunch is that there was no vestry resolution to take care of Charles, no sermon from the rector, and no committee or Ministry Team got involved.  My guess is that some folks got together, saw a need and recognized potential, and made something happen that transformed a life.  In the story of the 10 lepers, Jesus saw a need, had the ability, recognized potential and made something happen, too.  Where do we see need, recognize potential, and have the ability to make something happen?  The reading from Jeremiah reminds us that we are called to take action now, where we are presently located, in the current circumstances of our lives, and not wait until our life situation changes to something more suitable for doing the work of God.  Jesus calls us to see need, recognize potential, and use our abilities to make amazing things happen now.  Our response to that call will transform both our lives and the lives of others.  Both the story of the 10 lepers and the story of Helen Myers call us to gratitude and generosity, no doubt about that.  But these stories also remind us of Jesus’ call to see need, to recognize potential, and to be generous with our abilities.  Such faith is the stewardship of our lives in action.                                                 

                            

Amen.